Abstract

Scholarly publications are still the most visible part of the scholarly communication process, and often the only way to get an insight in a variety of activities related to someone’s research, like a collection, analysis, and interpretation of the research data in order to increase understanding of a phenomenon concerned. Scholarly publications are also a key contributors to career advancement in the majority of disciplines, including social sciences and humanities.
In order to serve and encourage the development of science scholarly communication should change and adopt to the present times. But the stakeholders in the scholarly communication life cycle, academic and research institutions, funders, researchers as authors/peer-reviewers/readers, editors and publishers need often to confront and overcome obstacles, some of them related to the questionable and not-well-argumented common beliefs, followed by the wrong-headed policies. Myths and misconceptions related to the characteristics of the contemporary journals and articles, „publish or perish“ concept, evaluation criteria for the scientific advancement, common metrics, peer review process, business models and openness will be discussed.